Insights
Have you ever received a sales or marketing email that missed the mark? We’re betting you have. What about that email didn’t resonate with you? Maybe it was the design or the introduction. Or maybe it focused too heavily on the person or business sending the email — their product, their solution, their differentiators — and not enough on you, your digital marketing problem, or why you’d benefit from their product or solution.
At Br8kthru, we call this “inside-out thinking,” because it’s the opposite of the approach we’ve found to be most effective. Instead of focusing on your solution or service, consider switching your thinking to be “outside-in” — focus on your prospects’ digital marketing problems first and foremost. Not only have we found this to be more effective, but we’ve put together a five-step framework to help you reframe your sales and marketing activities to follow this way of thinking.
A Five-Step Framework to Drive Buying Behavior
Buyers make two major decisions before purchasing: first, they must decide that what they have now, their status quo, isn’t working for them anymore; second, they must decide who is the best company to solve their digital marketing problems. In this framework, we introduce five steps to solving a problem — instead of selling a solution. We establish what needs to be done to equip you and your team to disrupt the status quo and convince prospects that you’re the best solution to the problem.
1. Identifying the Problem You Solve
What is your company’s core purpose? The first step to solving a digital marketing problem is to understand “the five whys,” borrowing from Jim Collins. This will help you drill down into what you truly exist for, and that will help you understand who you should be targeting and guide you to step two. Similarly, identify your competition and begin to understand what their key purpose is, to help you focus your own. Identify and assess gaps and opportunities until you can best position yourself as unique in the market. Together, these are the foundational elements that will set your sales + marketing efforts up for success.
2. Clarifying Who Has That Problem
After you understand your “why,” you can begin to understand who is looking for the solution you offer. Developing personas and ideal customer profiles can help you guide your sales + marketing efforts to be more effective and focused on these people. Keep in mind that not all stakeholders, priorities, and reasons to buy are created equal. The owner’s priorities at an organization may differ from the purchaser's, and both may differ from the end user’s. Your personas and ICPs can help you establish who you’re talking to and what their digital marketing problems are, so you can begin to disrupt their status quo.
3. Understanding Your Prospect’s Status Quo — And Making It Not OK
Here we reach the first decision your prospects are making: that their status quo is not OK. In order to get to that stage, you must challenge prospects to think outside their status quo and challenge their own assumptions, beliefs, and fears. We recommend looking for triggers that may change their mindset, trends to leverage, and possibilities for what could happen. This will allow you to understand the status quo so you can begin the process of changing it.
4. Creating Your Messaging
The next step is an easy spot to revert to “inside-out thinking” — don’t fall into that trap! Often, messaging is a culprit in “inside-out thinking,” where it focuses too much on the company or solution and not enough on the problem. To combat this, be strategic and conduct a gap analysis of competitors and strategic opportunities to differentiate yourself. By focusing on this data, you can create messaging that more accurately addresses the needs of your audience, helping position you as the best company to solve their digital marketing problems.
5. Developing + Deploying Reframed Sales + Marketing Strategies
Finally, you can begin to develop and deploy a winning sales + marketing strategy. Research shows that omnichannel strategies are an increasingly effective way to share growth — the more channels an organization deploys, the bigger the market share gains. As you begin to implement omnichannel experiences, consider a blend of human and digital methods to find a winning combination of tactics. At the same time, assess your organization’s Digital Marketing Maturity to best understand what tactics to prioritize in alignment with organizational goals.
Make Gains Toward Outside-In Thinking with a Digital Gap Audit
Now that you understand the importance of putting prospects’ digital marketing problems first and foremost — and you have our five-step framework to help you do so — you’re ready to go out and execute. Not sure where to start? We can help. Br8kthru offers a complementary Digital Marketing Gap Audit. After a brief conversation with our team to better understand your goals and organization, our subject matter experts will analyze your current digital marketing tactics and strategies. Then, we’ll identify current strengths and opportunities, so you can best position yourself for success moving forward.